I Stopped Trying to Stay on Top. That’s When Things Got Easier.

I Stopped Trying to Stay on Top. That’s When Things Got Easier.

What a forgotten Japanese tradition taught me about accepting the things I cannot control.

A few weeks ago, I sat in a café with Nicholas and Catherine and watched Catherine describe what I recognized immediately: the specific exhaustion of someone who had been trying very hard to stay in a good place, and had failed, and was now convinced the failure was her own fault.

She’d been working well for months. Good momentum, good output, good feeling about her research. Then one thing went wrong — her thesis outline came back for a complete rethink. Not a failure, just a redirection. But by the time she told us about it, that single event had somehow grown into a full indictment of her presence in Japan, her academic ability, her future plans.

Nicholas called it panic. He wasn’t wrong. But I kept thinking about something older than financial terminology — a way of understanding cycles that I’ve carried for a long time, not because I studied it formally, but because it was simply part of the air I grew up breathing.

What Onmyodo Actually Is

Most Westerners encounter yin and yang as a symbol — the circle with the two interlocking shapes, one dark, one light, each containing a seed of the other. It’s been on t-shirts and tattoos long enough that the meaning has worn smooth.

But the tradition behind that symbol, Onmyodo (陰陽道), is a cosmological framework that has shaped Japanese thought for over a thousand years. It’s not a religion in the Western sense. It doesn’t ask you to believe in anything supernatural. At its core, it simply describes the structure of change — how everything moves between states, and why neither state is permanent.

Yin (陰) and yang (陽) are not opposites at war. They are phases. One is always transforming into the other. Yang — the bright, active, expansive — carries within it the seed of yin before it reaches its peak. And yin — the quiet, receptive, contracting — carries within it the seed of yang before it reaches its floor.

This is not a metaphor. It’s meant as a description of how things actually work.

The Part That Changed How I Move Through the World

I was not always as calm about difficult periods as I probably appear now. I trained in Kendo from the age of six, and Kendo teaches — or is supposed to teach — fudoshin: immovable mind. I misunderstood this for years. I thought it meant never being disturbed. An inner stillness so complete that nothing could reach it.

That’s not what it means. It means being disturbed and not losing your footing.

The difference is enormous. One is a fantasy of imperviousness. The other is a skill you actually develop.

Onmyodo helped me make peace with that distinction. If yin always follows yang — if the low always follows the high, not as punishment but as physics — then the goal cannot be to prevent the low. The goal is to know it’s coming. Not intellectually, in a way that sits untouched in the background, but actually know it, in a way that changes your posture before it arrives.

I keep a prepared bag near my door — water, a few days of essentials, documents, a small amount of cash. I’ve kept it there since the 1995 earthquake. Not because I think about earthquakes every day, but because having it there means I’ve already accepted the possibility. The bag doesn’t cause me anxiety. It prevents it. The preparation is the acceptance, and the acceptance is what makes it possible to live without bracing.

The low period works the same way.

Three Things I Actually Do

I want to be careful here. I’m not an Onmyodo practitioner in any formal sense. I can’t explain the cosmological significance of directions, or interpret the traditional calendar. What I can say is how this framework has shaped my habits — the small, ordinary things I do when I feel the cycle turning.

1. I name the phase without judgment.

When things slow down — work feels heavier, energy feels thinner, ideas feel less alive — I try to say to myself, as plainly as possible: I’m in a yin phase right now. Not “something is wrong.” Not “I need to fix this.” Just: the cycle is here. This is what it looks like.

That naming does something. It converts a vague anxiety into a simple fact. And simple facts are easier to be with than vague anxieties.

2. I stop trying to force yang.

This is harder than it sounds. Modern life, especially professional life, runs entirely on the assumption that productivity should be continuous. If you’re slowing down, you need to troubleshoot. You need to optimize. You need to find the leak.

Sometimes there is no leak. Sometimes the cycle is just in yin, and the most sensible thing is to let it be yin.

I use this time deliberately. I do the less demanding work. I read more than I write. I walk instead of running. I cook slowly. None of this is giving up. It’s recharging in the way the season actually calls for, not in the way I wish the season was.

3. I change something small in my environment.

This might sound odd, but I’ve found it genuinely useful. When I feel stuck — when the quality of a yin phase starts to feel heavy rather than just quiet — I change something physical. Sometimes I move my desk to face a different direction. I put a plant on my worktable. I clean a space I’ve been ignoring.

The function isn’t feng shui in any mystical sense. The function is signal. Moving the desk is a physical act that tells my body: something has shifted. It’s a small ceremony of transition. It works on my nervous system in ways I can’t fully explain, and I’ve stopped needing to.

The Part Catherine Understood Before She Had the Words for It

What struck me in our conversation wasn’t the spiral itself — that’s common enough, and understandable. What struck me was the moment Catherine said: I turned one thing into everything.

That’s the real work of a difficult cycle. Not surviving it, but keeping it the right size.

The thesis came back. That was the event. Everything that followed — the questions about belonging, the sleeplessness, the spreading doubt — that was the mind’s response to the event. The event was yin. The spiral was something the mind built on top of yin.

I’ve done it myself. Anyone who has worked hard for a long time and experienced a sudden reversal has done it. You start asking what it means. And the mind, left to its own devices at 3 a.m., will find the darkest possible answer.

What Onmyodo gave me wasn’t optimism. It gave me a different kind of question to ask when things turn. Not what does this mean? but what phase is this? Because what does this mean is a question with no floor. It can spiral downward as long as you let it. But what phase is this is a question with a simple answer: this is yin. It won’t last. That’s not a promise — it’s the nature of the cycle.

A Note on What This Isn’t

I’m not suggesting everyone should study Onmyodo or reorganize their life around it. I’m not a practitioner, and I have no interest in being a cultural gatekeeper about something I hold loosely myself.

What I am saying is that this particular idea — that low periods are not malfunctions, that they are phases with their own logic and their own end — has been genuinely useful to me. Not as a philosophy I believe in the way one believes in a doctrine, but as a frame I reach for when the cycle turns.

Nicholas reaches for scenario planning. Catherine, I think, is still working out what she reaches for. That’s fine. The specific container matters less than having one.

What This Means to Me

I don’t remember exactly when I stopped trying to maintain the high. It wasn’t a single decision. It was more like a gradual loosening — the way you stop fighting a current and start moving with it.

What I know is that since then, the difficult periods are still difficult, but they don’t compound the way they used to. A slow week is a slow week. A setback is a setback. They don’t become evidence of some deeper failure, because I’m not trying to prove anything by staying on top.

The earthquake bag by the door isn’t optimism or pessimism. It’s just honesty about the nature of things.

The low periods are the same. They’re coming. They always were. Knowing that isn’t resignation — it’s the only preparation that actually works.

This essay is a companion to the dialogue “Everything Felt Wrong at the Same Time. Was That Just Bad Luck? (Diarogue)” — a conversation with Nicholas and Catherine about cycles, spirals, and why the first bad thing is rarely the real problem.